One of our clients, an ecommerce store owner, contacted us in a panic today saying that she wasn’t meeting her sales targets for the month (this client chose not to use our ongoing marketing services). As a reaction to this she had (unbeknown to us) just spent a lot of money printing and delivering 20,000 leaflets in her area which had yielded barely one or two sales.

Now in the past we have advised this client that this kind of untargetted knee jerk reaction to marketing is costly and generally leads to poor results.

She asked what we could do to help turn things around for her, and fast.

9 times out of 10 if you are looking to boost any business the starting point should be with your existing customer base. These are people that know, like and trust you (hopefully) and are usually the easiset to approach with some kind of offer to elicit a new transaction.

So with this is mind we decided the fastest and most cost effective method would be to send out a special offer email to all her past customers.

Here is what we did:

1) We drafted an email – using some carefully crafted copy to tie into a topical subject as a valid ‘reason why’

2) We sent the email to the client for her to review it

3) We sent it out to all of her list using our emarketing system

4) We had a substantial order placed on the site.

So how long did this process take? Well from the time the client first contacted us, to the order being processed it was less than 1 hour.

Based on our previous experience of email marketing campaings we expect this email will generate a further 2 or 3 sales over the weekend.

Now I don’t like to say to clients ‘I told you so’ but when I casually mentioned to this client that perhaps expensive mailshots were not the way to go, and that she should perhaps reconsider our ongoing monthly outsourced marketing services her reply was:

“I hear what you’re saying Matt loud and clear ! – Lesson learnt BIG TIME !!”

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